Reckoning

The later 1980s were a period of erratic growth—rapid but unstable. Tigers and sea turtles spurred development throughout the decade: East Asia’s “tiger” economies—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea—paved China’s way in state-led, export-intensive growth. China's “Sea turtles” were the many overseas Chinese who brought capital and knowledge acquired abroad back to their mother country. However, unresolved contradictions lurked in the new political economy of Deng’s China. Frustrations over stalled political reform—enflamed by widespread urban economic grievances over inflation and corruption—erupted in street demonstrations that paralyzed the PRC in the spring of 1989. The Tiananmen crisis would have lasting political repercussions on the cause of democracy—but also unintended economic aftereffects.

Hong Kong Provided China with Capital

Japan Provided Support for Reform

Autocracy and Economic Freedom Brought Growth

Expectations Are the Most Important Growth Factors

James Miles

China Correspondent, The Economist

James Miles has been the China correspondent for The Economist, based in Beijing, since 2001. Before that, he held many positions with the BBC, including Beijing bureau chief for BBC News and Current Affairs, from 1988 to 1994, Hong Kong correspondent for BBC World Service, from 1995 to 1997, and senior Chinese affairs analyst for BBC News London from 1997 to 2000. Miles has also worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, where he was editor of its journal, Strategic Comments, and research fellow for Asia from 2000 to 2001. Miles has reported on everything from the 1989 democracy uprisings, for which he won the prestigious Sony Radio Reporter of the Year award, to the handover of Hong Kong, the SARS outbreak, and the Beijing Olympics.

Looking around us in urban China at that time, it was still, very much, the same sort of picture you would have seen several years earlier. And officials in 1986 were, by and large, still locked in that ideological mindset of many years earlier. Their attitudes towards the foreign media were still certainly of that mold. And it was then not at all clear that the kind of economic changes that had occurred in the countryside would indeed take off in the cities. Everyone was still working in state-owned enterprises, people had no choice over their careers, they had no property, they lived in state assigned housing. Yes, the political rhetoric had shifted towards urban economic reform, but huge debates were raging in China, at the time, over whether or not they should be applied, how they should be applied and indeed what the outcome of such reform would be if it was carried out to the fullest extent. And whether there was a risk that urban reform would lead to utter chaos and the end of the Communist Party. From top to bottom in the system at the time, there was huge doubt about where to go and what to do. But, it was only one section of the Communist party, and that Maoist part that didn’t understand economics, that was deeply fearful of capitalism and felt that the party itself would be destroyed, remained very influential through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. So, it was a long process of disentanglement from the Maoist era. I think the truly revolutionary change, we didn’t begin to see until 1992.